GST Telecom was what was known as a "fiber-based CLEC" in industry parlance.
A LEC was a Local Exchange Carrier, or a local telephone company. After the
judge broke up Ma Bell back in the 1980s, her offspring, the Baby Bells, were
formally known as Local Exchange Carriers. A CLEC was a Competitive Local
Exchange Carrier, a company that had set itself to compete with one or more
LECs for local telephone customers. A "fiber-based CLEC" was a CLEC that was
building its own infrastructure of optical fiber, usually on a city-by-city
basis. In the late 1990s, there were several companies putting fiber into
major (or minor) US cities - MFS, TCG, ICG and GST were working the big
cities, and Brooks Fiber was working the smaller ones.

One difference between GST and the other players in the fiber-based CLEC space
is that GST was also working on installing its own long-distance fiber runs.
Part of their game was to install extra fibers and then trade those fibers
with other companies so that they could increase the size of their network
without actually having to dig trenches and lay cable themselves. GST's goal
was to make itself into some sort of substantial phone company that serviced
customers in a regional basis.

As part of their strategy of building this multi-faceted business, GST went on
a bit of a buying spree and picked up ISPs in Hawaii and the Pacific
Northwest. In the late 1990s, ISPs and telephone companies (telcos) were
considered to have synergy - to be complementary - because the telcos owned
the wires and fibers and the ISPs put signals (phone calls and data
connections) onto those fibers. The idea was that the ISP would save money by
getting their connections from their parent telco at wholesale rates, and the
telco would save money by getting the ISP to be a guaranteed customer for
their wires and fibers. In this manner, the overall company would be able to
save its way to success, or some such.

There was one small problem with GST's strategy: they weren't any good at
actually executing it. The first glimmering of this problem surfaced, from
the viewpoint of the folks at WENet, prior to the actual acquisition. People
who had been on staff at GST's prior acquisitions in Hawaii and Oregon had
created a series of web pages, hosted at satanic.org (a Satanism spoof site),
detailing their history with GST and their beefs with corporate management.

In a modest example of what a small world the Internet was, satanic.org was
run by Eric Sorenson. Eric was the roommate of JD Falk, who was an associate
of Scott's in anti-spam activism and a member of the Provisional Board of
CAUCE, the anti-spam lobbying organization. As part of CAUCE's early campaign
to lobby the US Congress to pass a good anti-spam law, the Board drafted a
letter to Congress, printed 535 copies of the letter, 535 envelopes for all of
the Senators and Representatives, and held an envelope-stuffing party. The
party was held at JD's house; attendees included Scott, JD, Eric Sorenson,
Sean Eric Fagan and James Glave, at the time a writer for Wired News. As part
of the proceedings, Scott brought a passel of supplies from Costco and
barbequed up a lunch for the crew.

-----

Back in the 1950s, a radio comic named Red Blanchard coined the term "zorch,"
meaning "cool," approximately. Scott's dad was a teenager in that era, and
a friend of his tagged him with Zorch as a nickname. When Scott was a small
child, his dad must have thought having a son was pretty cool, because he
called his son Zorch.

When Scott bought his first UNIX computer, his AT&T 3B1, he needed to have a
"node" name for it in order to be able to attach it to the UUCP network. He
decided that he really liked the name "zorch." When his dad objected, wanting
zorch to be reserved for Scott's first son, Scott stated that he wasn't going
to have kids and that he'd use the name for his computer.

It took Scott a lot of years to appreciate how that must have hurt his father.

Having named his UNIX computer "zorch", when Scott was a UUNet customer, his
customer account name and signon into UUNet's machine was the name of his UNIX
computer - zorch, again. In the mid-1990s, after Scott stopped being an
actual customer of UUNet, he got a guest account on one of their systems to
use for performing the public service of moderating some Usenet newsgroups.
When the UUNet staffer told him to pick an account name that wouldn't be in
conflict with one of their customers, he picked zorch as his account name.

After that, when Scott set up a computer account, if he couldn't get his first
choice ("scott"), he chose "zorch" as his account name. When he arrived at
Whole Earth, the account name "scott" belonged to one of his staff, so he took
his second choice. Thereafter, he was known as Zorch to the people who worked
for him.
Posted by scott at January 26, 2006 04:00 PM